Thursday, July 23, 2009

Tinners free at last? Swiss Judiciary: Not so fast

Though it looked as though the Swiss government would succeed in destroying, again, all of the evidence of the Tinners' involvement with the CIA in supplying the nuclear black market, the Swiss Judiciary and Swiss Parliament have been fighting back.

In remarkable scenes earlier this month, unimaginable in the US, Swiss Federal judges raided a federal building and seized a safe which contained the key to the filing cabinet which contains the documents.

"The Swiss federal council has agreed to hold back on the destruction of documents related to the St. Gallen family Tinner, allegedly implicated in an international nuclear proliferation network. In an agreement with the Control Commission Delegation (CD), the Swiss parliament’s investigative branch for national security issues, Justice minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, agreed to allow certain of the documents to be made available to the judicial investigation and for the Tinner family defense attorneys."

Of course, you won't read about this anywhere in the US media - despite the fact that black-market nuclear proliferation is purportedly an ongoing concern, and despite the fact that this constitutional crisis in Switzerland is largely the result of US involvement in Switzerland's internal affairs.

As even the New York Times' William Broad and David Sanger reported in their 5 page piece inAugust, 08:

"Over four years, ... operatives of the CIA paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in a suitcase stuffed with cash.[]Officials say the CIA feared that a trial would not just reveal the Tinners' relationship with the United States — and perhaps raise questions about American dealings with atomic smugglers — but would also imperil efforts to recruit new spies at a time of grave concern over Iran's nuclear program. Destruction of the files, CIA officials suspected, would undermine the case and could set their informants free.

"We were very happy they were destroyed," a senior intelligence official in Washington said of the files."

So why the silence from the US Corporate Media regarding these dramatic events in Switzerland? Sibel highlighted some pertinent 'forces' in her Dissecting the Mainstream Media series (part 2):

‘Pressure’ is one of those buzzwords you hear in almost all discussions involving the mainstream media and related topics: Government Pressure, Corporate Pressure, Special Interest & Lobby Pressure, Management Pressure, Colleagues Pressure…It’s always pressure - whether its pressure placed directly on the reporter, editor, or on the board and or ownership…So how does it work? How much pressure? What methods are used? Of course, the answer largely depends on ‘who’ the pressure comes from (government or corporate or …), ‘who’ is the target of the pressure (is it the source, the reporter, etc.).

We know that Broad and Sanger are mouthpieces for their masters (see my previous analysis of their August article 1, 2, 3, 4), but who are their masters? And what do their masters want? Why are they applying pressure to avoid exposure of this story?

Relatedly, we saw the same media silence when Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator, and AQ Khan expert, Douglas Frantz was threatened with criminal charges by the Swiss for attempting to meet with the Tinners.